It’s terrifying but it’s not entirely new, that “red line” was crossed long ago, with thunderous applause. Bush did this shit too, disappearing people off the streets with no due process and sending them off to be tortured at a CIA blacksite or Egyptian prison. And extraordinary rendition also goes back to Clinton, and then Obama explicitly reaffirmed that the US considers itself to have jurisdiction over every country on earth, that it can freely drone strike anywhere it thinks there are terrorists - and that can include US citizens as well.

These tools have existed for 20 years or more and constitute a massive violation of civil liberties both for Americans and for the entire world, they are fundamentally incompatible with a free society, and there was no telling how far they could be taken. These concerns were largely ignored and brushed aside because of 9/11 and the “Jack Bauer” fantasy of being a badass antihero who breaks all the rules to get things done, there was a virtually complete bipartisan consensus that these tools needed to exist and at no point has anyone had the opportunity to vote against any of it.

Trump is of course expanding the scale of it, which is terrifying. Maybe you’re right that he’ll be remembered as the “tipping point” into fascism, but the real tipping point was Bush, who was all the more terrifying because he was doing it while having like a 90% approval rating. Trump is just taking the mask off and doing it in a blatant, incompetent, and unpopular way, which makes him in some ways more dangerous and in some ways less.

Of course you could make the argument that it goes further back than Bush, the US has a long history of toppling democratically elected governments and disappearing people to blacksites, running experiments like MKUltra and the like. But there was a massive shift in discourse after 9/11 where caring at all about civil liberties meant you wanted the terrorists to win.

This might be corny but I remember a movie from my childhood - Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame - certainly a flawed movie in many respects, but you can tell that it was very obviously made before 9/11, because otherwise it would’ve read as a call to action to rise up and overthrow the US government. The bad guy is obsessed with hunting down minorities to the point that he burns and kills innocents, doing whatever it takes to get them, his ultimate act of crossing the line is violating the right of sanctuary, breaking and entering a place of worship that he wasn’t legally allowed to, at which point the heroic captain of the guard turns to open rebellion and rallies the masses against him - it’s a direct allegory for Bush’s presidency and calls for soldiers to disobey orders and turn against the government - except for the fact that it was made before he took office. Growing up at this time, I watched those virtues become vices and those vices become virtues. A mere five years later and Judge Claude Frollo would be the based antihero doing whatever was necessary to save Paris from terrorist infiltration while Captain Pheobus would be the weak disloyal liberal traitor undermining Paris’ safety through the sin of empathy because of his whiny “rules” about whose houses you’re allowed to burn down. (Although tbf, it was attacked at release, but the people attacking it were considered the far-right fringe as opposed to the mainstream discourse).

Trump is worse only because he’s further down the line of where this shit was always headed and where I’ve been saying it was headed since I was like 13 when libertarian weirdos like Ron Paul were the closest thing we had to any kind of opposition to any of it. I’m glad people are finally waking up to the fact that the president has dictatorial powers and that that’s a bad thing, but please remember that when the next, more competent fascist gets in and does all the same shit while being more “respectable” and having better PR.

Horrified and a bit scared. I’m currently out the country and I have to wipe my phone before heading back just in case. I don’t think I’ve said or done anything illegal, but just not liking Trump could get me in trouble these days.

I’ve got so much family here, a grandchild due soon, I can’t leave so that only leaves fighting. Ideally in the ballot box but I will defend this democracy by whatever means are left to me, as required by my oath of enlistment almost 34 years ago.

Along with wannabe Goebbels, Stephen Miller, saying that people spreading hate about America will be deported too. We’re in for some fucked up times.

But hey, maga was mad about egg prices and that black people and women get jobs so I guess it’s ok that we have a fascist dictatorship now right?

Also, for Stephen Miller: I fucking hate America, I fucking hate what you’ve turned this country into. We were never the greatest, but we were never this fucked up. America is worthy of hate. Fox news and Reich wing media have enabled all of this shit and if there was ever justice to be had their propagandists would fucking die in a fire.

Too many US citizens literally wanted all of this. They are settler-colonial culture, the moral descendants of slavery and Jim Crow, the very same Americans who sent native children to slaughter at boarding school and the black children to die in the chain gangs. Today, we all still happily outsource our poverty, violence, and environmental destruction to other countries so we can live comfortably.

What is happening now is the real USA. We were force-fed the “beauty” of the American experiment, the importance of “freedom” in school, the pride for our country, while never being taught empathy for all of those people in our way.

So, while I like to think that I know better, and of course I am absolutely horrified of what is happening, horrified at American history, terrified for my own future as a gay female, I am also beginning to understand that too many Americans want what is happening. To fix it, we need mass buy in and mass movements. But…the protests aren’t stopping anything and our leaders have too much money to care about us.

I’m trying really hard not to be defeatist. I’m going to do anything I can to help stop it. I’m going to fight in every way I know how. I don’t want to be sent to a concentration camp for being against the Trump regime and for being queer. I just don’t know how to juggle my job and all the other plates I have to keep in the air to survive while also fighting against such a massive deep-rooted wave of racism and sadism.

As an American I can no longer speak freely about what needs to happen to this unspeakably evil piece of trash without fear of being sent to his extermination camps.

It’s unfuckingbelievable.

Plan A is to tough it out. Illinois is a relatively safe state.

If ICE gets too close to me for comfort, or if Pritzker loses power, Plan B is to visit a friend overseas and forget to come back. Maybe we can find a civilized country that would not simply extradite us

If fleeing is not practical then Plan C is guns

Source?

Regardless, I think deporting legal immigrants with no due process was the red line. Just disappearing people is dictator levels of corruption.

As an American I am deeply offended, horrified, angry and increasingly resigned to what may have to happen.

The 2026 elections will likely be the most defining moment in American History since the American Revolution.